In this time of lockdown—and, for many, unimaginable loss—there is nonetheless a strange and gratifying ray of light. In the cocoon of the tiny French village where I’m sheltering, I’m interacting with a greater array of long-lost friends than I have in decades.

I was very young when I left America, barely out of my teens, and I never thought it would be three decades before I returned there to live. I remember so well the eve before my departure for London. I was with my equally young first husband, in New York. At dawn we were taking one of those cheapo charter flights that no longer exist; I think it was People Express. I had two large suitcases, one of clothes, one of books. We were starting a new life; one that twisted and turned and eventually, took different paths.

In 2017, after nearly 30 years, I did the reverse trip. I moved to Manhattan from my home in Paris with three large suitcases, one of summer clothes, one of winter, and one of books. In my hand luggage I took a few treasures—a photo album, a Russian lithograph I had bought on the Portobello Road 20 years before, my grandmother’s Limoges teacups.

But I was traveling light. I was starting another new life.

As a foreign correspondent for many years, I’ve roamed the earth and made many places my home. My closest friends are in Paris and London, the Berkshires, Maine, Monaco, Boston, New Jersey, Vienna, Sarajevo, Africa. Wherever I lived I tried to make some kind of nest, and a new circle of friends. I gathered many friends, many adventures.

But there are many other people I care for, and love, whom I lost track of. Life does that. You can’t stay in touch with everyone, even in the age of WhatsApp and FaceTime. You edit your life of friends in the way Marie Kondo edits her underwear drawer.

But corona, the evil pandemic, which is as peripatetic as I am, changed all that.

This “time of the virus,” as I call it, has brought lost friends and acquaintances back to me. In the rural village where I am sheltering, in the Vercors of France, far from everything (with a former husband, our son, and an extended family), I’ve reconnected with people I have not heard from in years. At night, after I pour water on the fire and retreat to my unheated room, I WhatsApp a friend in London. In normal life we meet once a year in August at a mutual friend’s house in Greece for a holiday.

Now we speak every night. We talk about banal things. It doesn’t matter. It’s the human contact that matters in times like these. “Tonight I ate spaghetti with venison meatballs,” he tells me. “Waitrose had a package in the frozen meat section.”

“I wonder what the recipe for a perfect tuna melt is,” I respond. “Mustard or relish?”

I message other friends whom I have lost track of. Some are sheltering in the English countryside. Some have remained in cities. Some, like me, are sharing spaces with their exes. Some are alone. Corona has somehow crossed over timelines, social strata, and years; people I let slip from my memory are now next to me, virtually.

A woman I barely knew wrote me because she saw an article I had written for Vanity Fair. We exchanged a few emails. By the fourth one we were telling each other things we have never told anyone else.

In a way it’s part of a fatalistic mindset that acknowledges human mortality and impermanence: The pandemic has scared the pants off all of us, so we’ve broken down social barriers. It reminds me of that old Tracy Chapman song: “If not now, then when?” What’s the point in waiting anymore to get in touch, to unburden your worries, to tell secrets?

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I am also amused at the turn my life has taken. I have gone from the hustle of my big-city Manhattan life to a place at the end of the world. There are less than 40 people in the village where I am staying. I rarely see any of them. I could walk in the cow pastures for an hour and perhaps see a small figure somewhere down the road: a farmer with his dog, or a mother walking with her children. In New York, I lived right by a number 6 subway station and in front of Lenox Hill Hospital. I could not leave my building without literally bumping into three or four rushing people at any time of day.

But here there is endless silence. On the wall of my bedroom (the home belongs to my ex-husband’s family; as with many French people, numerous cousins and relatives are involved in ownership), there is an old, faded painting in a broken frame, an artwork I have always loved. It’s called La Retour au Pays. Return to the countryside. It’s probably from the 1800s, and it shows a hearty French sailor sitting on a stool in an old-fashioned kitchen regaling the locals with his tales of the high seas. There’s a priest in the picture, an old woman in peasant dress, a few farmers. They watch with open-mouth wonder as the sailor speaks about a world they cannot possibly imagine from their world: a kitchen somewhere in the rural countryside.

It’s interesting because that’s how I feel now. I’ve roamed the world to corners people could not imagine: terrible places, of genocide, systematic rape, torture. And yet, during this strange, floating time, I am returning to a countryside, a place where I was married and where I will, no doubt, be buried when I die.

My life is down to basics. Things that ordinarily take no time at all, take all day in the countryside. Laundry, for instance: Washing clothes means using an ancient machine in the cellar that requires hours to cycle; then comes lugging an old wicker basket to a field; then the hanging of wet clothes on a sagging clothesline to dry, which takes a day or two. But how lovely they look, like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting—blue and pink sheets against a mountain sky, swinging on a rope next to a budding forsythia bush.

Or meals. I cook peasant food in old pots on an antiquated stove. In New York, I only ate protein and vegetables. Here I don’t care about carbohydrates. We eat potatoes and rice; pasta and baguettes to keep warm and because we are making meals for everyone in the household. To make coffee I use an old tin funnel I found in a drawer, and a milk jug. But that coffee is delicious.

My fitness routine consists not of a visit to Equinox on East 74th Street, but a morning hike to the small chapel in the forest built by my son’s ancestors. Along the way I pick yellow and purple wildflowers and put them at the feet of the statue of Our Lady. In New York, I had a fireplace that I lit for sheer pleasure, using pricey logs bought at D’Agostino. Here I huddle by the fire to keep warm, or to get light to read, and there’s a barn full of wood, chopped for the mountain winter that has not really lifted. Bathing is an ordeal. It involves shivering in a primitive bathtub in an unheated bathroom with a handheld shower. Even so, I find myself easing into these simple things, even finding pleasure in them. This is how life has been for centuries. In times past, before central heating, people kept warm by sleeping with their animals. I have three duvets piled on my antique wooden bed.

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These are anxious times. Yet, despite the displacement and sense of floating we all feel—the French call it flottement—there is something else. The gathering, the closeness of people all united by uncertainty and fear.

My friend and I talking about food at night is a mask for the anxiety we are holding. “It’s a lottery,” he told me the other night, “if one lives or dies during this time.” In wartime you can try to reduce your risks. You can stay away from crowded places if there is shelling. You can try to avoid minefields or areas where snipers operate. You can do research to avoid checkpoints of people who might kidnap and kill you. You can take precautions against corona. But it doesn’t give you that gambling privilege: Even with gloves and a mask on, you might go out and pass the wrong person. The infection that harbors inside you might kill you but not your neighbor. My friend is right: It’s a dreadful, dread-filled lottery.

This week I opened my email and my old college roommate had sent me some drawings I had made for her from the 1980s. Like the old peasants in Le Retour au Pays, I gaped in wonder at sketches made by my early, younger self. Why did I write that or do that or draw that? It was like returning to another country. And how wonderful to hear from this friend of nearly 30 years, whom I had lost, and now I’ve found.

And so, for all the sorrow corona carries, it might bring back, for many, a simplicity and clarity, and things newfound from our pasts. Friends, old, new, far. Gatherings and coming together. These last few months I’ve felt this period to be a reckoning of sorts. As so many people have mentioned, time and again, I know the world we emerge from will be different. My world has shrunk radically. But it is inhabited (virtually, for the moment) by dozens of people I had loved and lost and forgotten about—and whom I am so enchanted to see again.